Hi Billy, Great to hear you found the article so helpful! There's no reason at all why you can't use a website builder to create a website for yourself, even a blog style site. I'd recommend having a look at our website builder comparison chart as this is a good jumping off point and will give you some ideas of where to start. Off the top of my head, I know that Wix launched a new version of their blogging tool, which is really easy to use and can be integrated as part of a wider site (thankfully Wix is also super easy to use so it's great for newcomers to web design like yourself!) Hope that helps, - Tom

The first thing to do when building your website is to develop a plan. Before you move forward, think about what you want your website to do, and decide what success looks like for your website. When you look back at your results a few months after your website is complete, how will you know it was worth it? Make sure you are planning your site to match your goals.

This tutorial shows you how to make or create a website. It is intended for the beginner and layperson, taking you step by step through the whole process from the very beginning. It makes very few assumptions about what you know (other than the fact that you know how to surf the Internet, since you're already reading this article on the Internet). As some steps are more involved, this guide also links to selected relevant articles on thesitewizard.com that you will need to click through to read for more information.
Great article! Having trawled the internet and read quite a few websites on how to build a website, I can honestly say this is the most comprehensive and easy to understand - to a complete novice! Your step-by-step guide is thorough and very informative and has given me the confidence to go ahead and try to set up my own business website ... A big THANK YOU!

WordPress is a big name when it comes to creating websites. But you should know that WordPress.com, which is linked to in the table above, is not what most people are talking about when they mention WordPress. What most internet-savvy people mean by the term WordPress is the free, open-source blogging platform that comes from WordPress.org. Using this requires you to find your own website hosting service. The WordPress.org software is such a popular site-building platform that many web hosting services even offer managed WordPress hosting plans. WordPress.com, on the other hand, is a service that deploys and hosts that software for you, so you don't have to go out and find your own hosting service.

Although there are many considerations in web design, as a beginner, your first step is to actually get something out onto the web. The fine-tuning can come after you've figured out how to publish a basic web page. One way is to use a WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") web editor to do it. Such editors allow you to design your site visually, without having to deal with the technical details. They work just like a normal wordprocessor.
What’s awesome about Lightshot is that it integrates with your operating system’s default screenshot taking feature (Cmd + Shift + 9 on Mac or Print Scr on Win). When triggered, it lets you select a specific area of the screen, and then save it or share directly with other people. You can also edit the screenshot before saving (annotate it, add text, arrows, etc.).
GoCentral Website Builder lets you quickly build a customized site and get it out there for the world to see. It’s all done through components that we call sections. What're those? They're features that you can slide into your website to provide added functionality instead of being limited by a template. Just pick an industry or interest, and we drop you into a customizable design.
That’s just the name of the game in our internet-driven society. Unfortunately, your future site is not going to develop, maintain or pay for itself. From domain registration — not to mention finding one that’s still available — to design, web hosting, testing and so on, website creation is a unique chore demanding both human and financial resources. To help alleviate some of the burden, there are website builders offering free, easy-to-use solutions for creating beautiful business websites.

Starting with Wix's ADI (artificial design intelligence) tool, several of the site builders now offer a tool that lets you enter social accounts and other personal or business info, and presto bingo, they get you a no-work website. Jimdo and Simvoly now offer similar if somewhat less ambitious tools. Wix's ADI even impressed a professional designer acquaintance of ours with results we saw in testing, mostly using images and information it scraped from her LinkedIn account.

As a full-service website development and branding company, Blue Fountain Media offers SMB and enterprise clients websites that are professionally designed and fully optimized. While some "custom" web design companies use house-designed templates to create their products, Blue Fountain Media creates truly one-of-a-kind websites for each business it partners with.
WordPress (either version) is a blog-focused content management system that accepts plug-ins and themes that extend its capabilities to most of what the other products here offer, including commerce. In fact, WordPress.com uses plug-ins such as JetPack to provide many of its features. As a whole, WordPress (either .com or .org) is not as easy to use as the other options in this roundup, but if blogging and site transferability are of key importance and you don't mind digging into its weeds a bit, you should consider the platform. Furthermore, the ability to use WordPress is a valuable skill, as some estimates say that WordPress powers 30 percent of the internet.
Although there are many considerations in web design, as a beginner, your first step is to actually get something out onto the web. The fine-tuning can come after you've figured out how to publish a basic web page. One way is to use a WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") web editor to do it. Such editors allow you to design your site visually, without having to deal with the technical details. They work just like a normal wordprocessor.

“This makes it extremely easy for someone with no knowledge to design their own website and continue to add, edit and remove things as your business grows and changes with ease. Keeps things looking just as good whether you're using desktop or mobile, and works well hand in hand with GoDaddy hosting for our website to provide everything it needs for our employees and clients.” — Weebly review

In addition to website building, Weebly doubles as a domain registration platform, where you can lock down a prime URL for your website. Only paid plans allow URLs to be synced to sites; sites are otherwise allocated Weebly subdomains, but you can register and connect a domain to your website at a later date. You also can transfer a previously held domain from another provider to the site you build through Weebly. All plans, including free ones, include lead capture software and SEO software assistance, as well as access to the community forum and dedicated Weebly support through chat and email.
Thank you, I found this article pretty informative, nicely laid out and an enjoyable/easy read. I do have a question about the programs. I am looking for a program that I can run on my laptop to log into my company’s website and make little data changes on the small end. On the big end just copy a page template and input new information. It looks like some of these software programs are for installing on the web server and not for use on the personal computer. The last program I used for web design was FrontPage about 15 years ago. Any suggestions on the best program for these needs? Joomla was recommended, but you didn’t reference it at all.
Firstly you should decide what you want to create for example you want to create a social app, portfolio or you have some great idea for your business or other requirements because if you decided once what you want to make then it will easy for you to gather information about it and when you gathered full information then you will create sitemap your website, Actually sitemap describe the relations between the main areas of your website. Such representation could help understand how usable the final product will be.It can show you the “relationship” between the different pages of a website, so you can judge how easy it will be for the end-user to find the required information or service if he starts from the main page.
Stop whatever you're doing and ask yourself this simple question: "Do I need a website?" If your response was anything other than "yes," you need to think again. It doesn't matter if you're the head of a multinational corporation who employs thousands of people or a local mom-and-pop shop from around the way, you need a website to help potential customers find you online. If you have a business, failure to establish an online home is a failure to grow.
I would like to launch an online platform where people can leave reviews. Think of Yelp. In the future I’d like my users to be able to upload data as well. You can imagine this will be a complex platform long-term. Do you recommend to start with an online website builder like WordPress, Wix, etc or to have actual developers start from scratch? Looking forward to your response! Thanks!

Some sources state that 25% of the websites using content systems are using WordPress. Although started purely for blogging, now you can create amazing websites for any vertical using pre-made themes and templates. The advantages of WP is a huge community (that works to improve the product), and large marketplaces to cater for plugins, designs, technical help and much more. The learning curve is not too steep, but possibilities are endless.

I want to create a website that promotes a drugless, non-surgical service for patients in pain and weekend warriors. I want my site to have video testimonials, information about services, inquiries for consultations and possibly the ability to schedule appointment for service. Essentially we need a web presence for this service that drives traffic to us, demands them to take action to increase sales (who doesn’t, right?) Recommendations? Thanks.

Beta testing. Launching your website is an exciting process and people eager to get it live as soon as possible. With all the excitement, often people ignore the testing step. It’s critical you test your website before it goes live. The testing process can seem overwhelming, and you are not sure where to start. We are here to tell you that it’s not that complicated, you just have to check the following points carefully:
Investigate e-commerce solutions — How are you planning to sell and accept payment on your website? You’ll need to get that squared away before promoting your website. If you’re using WordPress, we recommend Woocommerce (so much so, that we’ve even got hosting just for Woocommerce users). Study up on the world of e-commerce and pick an online payment gateway.
In my feature comparison table I show which website builders you let design a website from scratch— and there are a handful. Of those I would recommend Wix. Wix is an excellent, highly customizable website builder. It can be a bit overwhelming with the amount of options it provides— but that's exactly what you want if you're designing a theme from scratch.
Hi Latisha, Shopify is great for those who are not super technical as they are much easier to use compared to other e-commerce platforms. This is not to say that you can make unlimited number of customizations to the themes without ever touching codes, as some levels of modifications does require touching some codes. But if you just choose a theme, and work within the capability of the theme with Shopify's tools, then you can get a really good store up and running fairly quickly. But if there is a certain look / feel / feature that you want to achieve that is outside the design of the theme, then you may have to code it yourself, or hire a Shopify expert to do so. Hope this gives you a bit more guidance! - Jeremy
If you don't have a design already in place and think templates are too limited, consider Adobe Muse CC. This unique little program concentrates on letting you design. Templates are handy, embeddable web fonts are great, and the sitemap view may be the best way to get an overall feel for what your site will have. Export it to HTML and you're ready for upload. It's part of the Creative Cloud bundle and also available individually for $14.99 a month with a yearly plan.
I wonder why hasn’t W3 schools been updated design wise, etc. Such a popular tool with so little support. I still visit it often, but started getting a bit annoyed. I agree that they’re not a very effective tool for stricly learning, but its a great library in a pinch. For a more immersive learning I’ve been studying from Interactive courses on BitDegree.

Hello Amanda, I'd suggest you take a look at Squarespace. With Squarespace, you can create blogs, sell services, upload images / videos, sell digital products (ebooks). They also allow you to export most of your content into WordPress (a very powerful and popular website builder) later if you want that option. The benefit of using Squarespace now is that you can build a website without knowing how to edit codes. You can literally have your site up in quite a short period of time. With WordPress, it's much more advanced and technical so it's not as user-friendly compared to Squarespace. You can see our comparison between them here. So Squarespace is much easier to get setup and will give you what you need. Once you're established and want a much more advanced platform down the road, WordPress is worth considering. Jeremy

Creating a website is not as complicated as it was before. Today, you don’t have to know much about technology to develop and successfully run your own site. That’s because there are more than few popular content management systems that are designed for the users. So, the first thing you should do is to choose a content management system. Although it depends on the site you want, we would strongly suggest self-hosted WordPress.

“This makes it extremely easy for someone with no knowledge to design their own website and continue to add, edit and remove things as your business grows and changes with ease. Keeps things looking just as good whether you're using desktop or mobile, and works well hand in hand with GoDaddy hosting for our website to provide everything it needs for our employees and clients.” — Weebly review
Zangre is a Senior Research Specialist who helped with spearheading G2 Crowd’s expansion into B2B Services. He studied journalism at the University of North Florida — which is still undefeated in football — and joined G2 Crowd in 2016 when there was only one other “Andrew.” He has enjoyed contributing to newspapers and online publications while pursuing music and comedy projects in his free time.
Think of templates as ‘clothes’ for your website. If you don’t like one set of clothes, just change to another one to give your website a completely different feel. And again, don’t rush into it. Choose different templates, browse them, see if they fit. The whole point of templates is choice, so dive in and find one that feels right for what you want to achieve.